New Frontier Lyrics

Lyric discussion by rikdad101@yahoo.com 

Cover art for New Frontier lyrics by Donald Fagen

The video does justice to the lyrics, with a wicked twist: The boy gets his dream girl to enter the bomb shelter with him under the pretense that a nuclear war is afoot. They take advantage of the situation to make whoopie. In the morning when the boy awakes, the girl is gone, and he fears that ironically, a nuclear war really did break out when he leaves the shelter to see someone in a fallout suit. But as the figure doffs the helmet, he sees it's his girl, having a laugh at his expense.

The song and video both are packed with period-piece touches. "New Frontier" is a JFK phrase, and bomb shelters are also the stuff of the early 1960s. This is almost the era of another song on this album, IGY. The video has a cartoon-within-the-video that captures the style of commercial design (and animation) from that time.